Stories of America

Realism - in painting style, if not fact - is the vehicle for recounting the country's evolution in an exhibition of pictures from Southern museums.

[Images from Tampa Museum of Art]

George Caleb Bingham, Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1856-71, oil on canvas.

	Mary Hoover Aiken, Cafe Fortune Teller, 1933, oil on canvas.
	Andrew Wyeth, Winter 1946, 1946, tempera on composition board.

TAMPA - The cliche aside, it's true that a picture often can move us beyond any number of words. But, unlike an essay or a novel, an image cannot convey an arc of time, an evolving character or an ongoing narrative. Still, all images, including the most abstract, have a story, even if it's one solely of form or color.

Viewers will not have to stretch to find the stories in the charming exhibition, organized by the Southeastern Art Museum Directors Consortium, at the Tampa Museum of Art.

"Tales from the Easel: American Narrative Paintings from Southeastern Museums circa 1800 to 1950" is resolutely realist, a big melting pot of American art and history that consciously ignores major movements such as abstract expressionism and ends, conveniently, before the wild proliferation of nonrealist art styles beginning in the late 1950s. Its historic sweep is similarly noncomprehensive.

But take it on its own didactic terms and you will be rewarded with a rich, compelling experience.

For western Europeans, "America" began centuries ago as a story, a place only imagined until explorers began landing on its shores. Ignoring some harsh realities, those early harbingers tended to fantasize about its potential.

We've told stories about America ever since. Never mind if they're fact or fiction; the important thing is that they be convincing.

Thus, the 70 paintings by about that many artists are grouped thematically rather than chronologically under 10 categories: literature, fantasy, history, politics, community, agrarian America, urban America, domestic life, childhood and death.

Some of the groupings are narrow to the point of being parochial. Of the five paintings in "politics," four deal with slavery and civil rights. (That's understandable because they are on loan from Southern museums, but still.) And the lines blur with many paintings; Alfred Boisseau's Louisiana Indians Walking Along a Bayou falls into the domestic life category but could as easily, and perhaps more convincingly, have fit into the group of historical scenes.

Most make the point that narrative values trump factual data every time, at least in art. George Caleb Bingham's wonderful Washington Crossing the Delaware is a stirring patriotic anthem, beautifully composed, with the general astride his horse in a classic pose, dominating the center of the canvas; never mind that the soldiers look entirely too clean and well-fed for that moment in the Revolutionary War.

The roster of artists ranges from the famous - Winslow Homer and Childe Hassam, for example - to the obscure, but most works are suggestive of their moments in this country's time line, the sensibility of the artist and the context within which he or she lived and worked.

Brideship (Colonial Brides) and Engineer's Dream are unmistakeably from the hand and imagination of regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton, with their dramatic Renaissance lighting and mannered, elongated figures. But Benton, a Depression-era artist, infuses them with social commentary. The engineer, for example, can be seen as more than just a careless worker responsible for a catastrophic train wreck; he might be an allegorical representation of President Herbert Hoover, who many believed was asleep at a much bigger economic wheel.

Some transcend their time. Barking Up the Wrong Tree, a genre scene by Francis William Edmonds, is not a great painting, but its message, 150 years after it was completed, is hilariously obvious and universal. An oafish suitor sits glumly staring at the object of his affections - or aspirations - and she, relaxed and self-confident, smiles sweetly at the painter - and us - telegraphing a look that in modern parlance would translate to, "As if."

Philip Evergood's homage to an indomitable and slightly dotty-looking Southern lady sitting placidly outside her Victorian mansion amid the havoc wreaked by a hurricane while her dog cowers nearby in My Forebears Were Pioneers is full of wit, painted with a surrealist edge.

And the city scenes interpreted by Reginald Marsh and George Luks teem with energy and mystery, in contrast to the sunlit innocence of Edward Henry Potthast's Happy Days, a vision of summer's pleasures at the beach.

One of the most interesting sections deals with childhood and illustrates our changing perceptions of it. Thomas Sully's 1825 painting, Juvenile Ambition, presents children as miniature adults, and George Henry Hall and John George Brown painted street urchins in that century as bucolic workers without ironic allusions to child labor issues. Compare them with Andrew Wyeth's very 20th century portrait of a young boy lost on a windswept, barren hill in Winter 1946, which is riddled with angst and sadness.

And there is the astonishing Playground by Paul Cadmus, painted several years after Wyeth's work, a tour de force in egg tempera, filled with narrative and painterly references, that looks as fresh today as John Currin's celebrated portraits. The urchins in this scene are street toughs who could be prototypes for West Side Story's Sharks and Jets. Yet the central figure is a beautiful blond youth, naked from the torso up, painted like an Old Master god who stares at us with haunted eyes as life teems around him.

Most of the 19th century genre scenes - paintings of daily life - are sentimental and often idealized by today's standards, but in their straightforward, beautifully rendered way, they provide windows into life lived upstairs and downstairs.

Some of the "stories" are personal and cryptic, though intensely interesting, such as Carroll Cloar's Story Told By My Mother in which a woman encounters a jaguar in a landscape part Rousseau, part folk art, and Mary Hoover Aiken's Cafe Fortune Teller, a painting depicting a lone woman in a crowded tavern of men, dealing her cards.

Within its broad theme, "Tales from the Easel" delivers a lot of variety on many levels even as it advances a central theme, a uniquely American blend of naive optimism and pragmatic aspiration, that life is an upward progression toward perfection, along with a concomitant belief in success as a moral imperative.

Philosopher Hannah Arendt's observation about storytelling, "it reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it," applies to the exhibition, too. This is a little less than a thousand words on the subject. But you get the picture.

- Lennie Bennett can be reached at 727893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com

REVIEW

"Tales from the Easel" is at the Tampa Museum of Art, 600 N Ashley Drive, through July 11. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. The museum is open until 8 p.m. on the third Thursday of each month. Admission is $7 adults, $6 seniors, $3 students, free for children under 6. And by donation on third Thursday from 5 to 8 p.m. and every Saturday 10 a.m. to noon. (813) 274-8130.

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